Horror Remix Recap / The LC Book Club Reads a Graphic Novel About Whores and Johns

You might think that paring a full-length 80's horror film down to a tight 31-minute runtime would result in an incoherent mess, a video-like montage of boobies and beheadings (Chip: "Not that there'd be anything wrong with that."). But Adam Jeffers' recut Hell Night (1981) actually retains the film's narrative (such as it is) while presumably removing all the superfluous downtime. It's a powerful tale in which a fraternity hazing goes awry as the pledges run afoul of a deformed killer in an old family mansion.

Chip: "Two observations: (1) the little girl from The Exorcist grew up to have pretty large breasts (one website calls her a 'cherubic sex dumplin') and (2) the best line in the film is 'I surf, I drink, and I screw,' which I'm likely to borrow as a pick-up line next time I'm in Shark's Surf Shop."

Hell Night was the first film in the Larryville debut of Horror Remix, a project by Adam Jeffers which cuts three horror films (in this case, sorority slashers) down to their basics and screens them back to back, in a a two hour block, with taped commentary from a couple of puppets in between (we thought there was going to be a live puppet element to the evening: slight disappointment).

We'd count the event a success, with probably 75 or so people relaxing in a candelit setting with extra tables (photo below), providing a romantic atmosphere for fence impalings, a pitchfork fight, and countless stabbings.

Our feminist readers: "The knife, of course, is a phallic symbol, and every stabbing is a symbolic rape."

Chip: "Yes, yes, I think we're all well-versed in feminist film criticism here. The evening's second film, The House on Sorority Row, which was recut to a still-slightly-too-long 49 minutes, even riffed on this idea, if you ladies had been paying attention instead of giving us all nasty looks each time the crowd laughed and cheered at the slicing and dicing."

The evening left us with a nostalgic feeling for an era when horror films were actually fun (as opposed to the joyless self-importance of today's torture porn, not to mention pointless remakes targeted to a demographic that's ignorant of the originals, such as the recent Sorority Row, a remake of last night's second feature).

Horror Remix is slated to occur each month. It's free (a free event at the Bottleneck?!), with free popcorn. We'd recommend you check it out.

















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Chip believes that everything animated is for children and that all comic books are for teenage geeks. But maybe he'll change his mind if he reads Chester Brown's Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John :

"This is not a feel-good comic book. It’s sober and intense, as if written by a lonely and homely Lou Reed and meant to be read aloud beneath a single light bulb hung from the ceiling. But it delivers a series of moral and cerebral and horndog thwacks" (NY-Times)

Richard: "We'd be forever satisfied if anyone ever described this blog as delivering 'a series of moral and cerebral horndog thwacks.'"

Chip: "I read every book under a single light bulb hung from the ceiling."